Laura Kalbag has some interesting thoughts that I’ve been pondering myself:

Are all analytics bad analytics? Is there room for “ethical analytics” that only tracks anonymous data with limited uses?

Just the other day, I removed Google Analytics from this site. The reason being that I’m not going to track people who don’t want to be tracked. I won’t be just another person who has no regard for the privacy of my readers.

All that being said, it’s my hope that an ethical way of gathering stats comes to exist. I don’t believe that all analytics are bad analytics, considering that some can be very useful. But a line has to be drawn, and if the choice is between not having access to interesting statistics or invading the privacy of others, I choose to lose the stats.